Brice Marden and Colourfield Painting * Berlin & Baden-Baden Exhibits

The grey layers of colour field painting

Brice Marden at Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin,

colour field painting at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

Fat layers of mud-grey on dark ground, with this raw style differed Brice Marden in the 60's from his Colorfield Painting colleagues in New York. First exhibitions in this time, e.g. 1966 in a single exhibition at the Bykert Gallery in New York established him in the already well situated scene of the American avant-garde.

In the same year Marden became an assistant of Robert Rauschenberg, who had left behind himself the tradition of the pictorial New York School with his assemblages and object-pictures. Brice Marden is to that extent an example of a Traditionalist in the great flow of American Abstract Art.

Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin dedicates a large retrospective to Marden under the custodial Charge of the Nationalmuseums in Berlin Brice Marden and Colourfield Painting * Berlin & Baden-Baden of Berlin and developed by the American houses Museum of Modern Art New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Until 07th October 43 painting and 11 designs are arranged from the last 40 years in Berlin, in order to give with new pictures like „The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Second version“ and „The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Third version“ a representative surview of Mardens development.

As incisive change shows itself the transition of the pure colour field painting, which is characterized by the occupation with light, color and surface, for calligraphic folding out of the image plane. The artist and the curators attribute this to Marden's systematic study of asiatic art during a journey in the 80's and a likewise conscious reference to Drip Paintings of Jackson Pollock. Likewise the later choice of strong colors and the organization of the image plane with linear ornaments can be understood as a nearly naively pictorial style, an approximation of Rauschenberg's style of Pop Art, perhaps also of the multi-color, monumental sculptures of Frank Stella. The pictures of the series „The Propitious Garden of Plane Image “ already suggest by its immense formats of seven meters width the association to that monumentally - abstract developments of Pop Art. But Marden remained in its approach obligated to an unironical seriousness of early abstraction. He thinks of the understanding and viewing of paintings as challenge:

„You have to think a lot. You must be able to bring the most different things together in your thinking, your conception, your whole body. You must really get involved in it. It is an experience, which absolutely takes you up. “

Accordingly the pictures are perhaps less of art-historical interest but benefit the category of the comparatively obliging and pleasing art. Its oil or colorglazing techniques, also wax-based, lead likewise in this direction. With his large formats and playful linear ornaments of the consciously painted colourfields, leaving nothing to coincidences, Marden surely successfully offers beauty for eyes looking for that.

2 June - 07 October 2007

Brice Marden - Retrospective

Hamburg Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwartskunst - Berlin

Invalidenstraße 50 - 51 · 10557 Berlin

Telephone (+49 30) 397834-11

Fax (+49 30) 397834-13

E-Mail hbf@smb.spk-berlin.de

http://www.hamburgerbahnhof.de

Within the coincidental, but successful interaction of German museums shows the arts center Baden-Baden under the title „Who's Afraid oF Red, Yellow and Blue?“ still another overview of the New York School in an exhibition, which sets its emphasis for more on the historically resulting Minimal Art. Also Brice Marden tied to the innovations of the colour field painting in the late sixties.

The Badeners find the representative positions of the Colorfield Painting in works of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Color Field Painting is a fundamental and at the same time radical analysis of the traditional view of the pictorial picture in painting, in which the canvas explicitly is not more than a thing with color carrying functions. How this strict style leads to Minimal Art is shown in Baden-Baden. To see this is a wonderful background knowledge to recognize the individuality of Brice Marden, that becomes particularly clear as artist between the styles.

Positions of the colour field painting

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

1 July - 30 September 2007

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

Lichtentaler Allee 8A

D - 76530 Baden-Baden

Tel. (cash) 07221 - 18360

http://hosting.zkm.de/kbb/ausstell/aus_01.html

Barnett Newman, Now I, 1965, acryl on canvas,

198.1 x 31.4 cm, private collection

Illustration: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.

Photos Brice Marden:

Brice Marden

Return I, 1964-1965

Oil on canvas,

127.6 x 173.4 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, Fractional and promised gift of Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr..

Brice Marden

Cold Mountain 6 (Bridge), 1989-91

Oil on linen,

274.3 x 365,8cm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Purchased through a gift of Phyllis Wattis

Brice Marden

6 talk skirt I, 2000-2002

Oil on linen,

271.8 x 190.5 cm

Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, Phoenix, Maryland

Report: Dr. U. Ritter